“Luctor et Emergo” is a life-long street photography project.

In Latin it means “I struggle and I overcome” – a motto of all passers-bys whom I photograph.
Why to photograph the world around us? Why capture those minute events we carry inside until we die? The gaze of someone in the crowd, the butterflies in the stomach when seeing someone who we care about, reading a sign on the street, hearing a whistle of a passing train, witnessing the gestures of an arguing couple in the park – all this can be in one photograph, in one image, which stops the time to fool the fleetingness of everything.

My attempt to capture the evanescing instant  is perhaps the need to grasp the feelings, the notions of moments, which are gone forever and the desire to preserve the tangible proofs of being alive. It is everything about the Time and the conscious recognition that nothing, absolutely nothing lasts. The Time creates those moments and at the same time terminates them.

I lived and photographed in many cities and I emphasize the common in our existence rather than differences of places.
I use analog photography for my B&W images and I develop, print and selenium tone all my photographs. They are printed on archival fiber paper.

None of my B&W images were cropped.
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TIME
I’m the time of hollow steps
on the darkened path behind my dreams

I’m the time inside a broken clock
with holes into the futile past

I’m the time whose breath I have to catch
in the beating chest of silent sobs

I’m the time who saw your hands of child
touching the toy of naked hope

You stand still and I will move
You will move and I will run

© text Vendula Ralkova